Biobeam – Rigorous wave-optical simulations of light- sheet microscopy

Sample-induced image-degradation remains an intricate wave-optical problem in light-sheet microscopy. Here we present biobeam, an open-source software package that enables to simulate operational light-sheet microscopes by combining data from 10–10 multiplexed and GPU-accelerated point-spread-function calculations. The wave-optical nature of these simulations leads to the faithful reproduction of spatially varying aberrations, diffraction artifacts, geometric image distortions, adaptive optics, and emergent wave optical phenomena, and renders image-formation in light-sheet microscopy computationally tractable.